Debut novel about a young American woman on the road to corruption in Asia

N A V A R E N E K

from Spiritland
Paranoia started like a sickness, creeping through and infecting my entire body. I didn't leave my room except to go downstairs to the café. I'd heard stories from other travelers about full-scale raids on guesthouses, everyone's nightmare, and kept thinking it might happen to me. The opium was still buried somewhere deep in my knapsack. It would have been so unfair if I were busted for something that wasn't even mine. Eric had never really given me a choice whether to participate in his little scheme or not. From the garden I kept a vigil on all visitors entering and exiting the guesthouse. Whenever I saw someone looking suspicious, my heart started racing and I broke into a sweat, certain that the person was looking for me. I tried to keep Jake out of my room because I was afraid he'd find the stuff. He was a hunter, attuned to his surroundings.
There was a lot I didn't know about him. Although he was nearly twenty years older than most of the other travelers, he still seemed to hang around us faithfully. His relationship with us reminded me of the way a cat likes to bat around a mouse, without really harming it. Then when the cat gets bored and decides the game is over, he will think nothing of snapping the mouse's neck and walking away. "Don't tell me you're one of those scribblers I see in the restaurants jotting down every goddamn bowel movement," he said one day when he saw me writing in my journal. "It's not that kind of a diary," I told him, embarrassed that he had found out that I kept such a self-conscious hobby. I expected him to pursue it and eventually grab the notebook and read what I'd written, but he just nodded and took a seat beside me on my bed. "I knew someone in the army who kept a diary," he admitted. "He wasn’t the type you’d think of doing anything like that, but he did. It was as if he just knew something really big was about to happen to him and he wanted to capture every moment. We told him that nothing anyone wanted to read was ever going to happen, but we were assholes. When something did happen, it was too late. He was dead, and he couldn’t write about it anymore. The diary was sent to his folks at home. Besides a live soldier, it was the best thing they could have gotten back from the war. The funny thing about that diary was, he never knew if what he was writing was ever going to mean anything to anyone else. For Christ’s sake, this guy had written about the food he ate in the goddamn mess tent and the weather each day. He didn’t write about anything heavy like what it felt like to be eighteen years old and dropped into the middle of a fucking battlefield where everyone was shooting at you and you couldn’t tell who the enemy was and who was on your side. He wrote as if it were just another day: ‘Today we ate green eggs and ham. Oh yeah, Joey got his head blown off by a 122 millimeter shell. His guts hung off the palm fronds like red tinsel on a Christmas tree.’"

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